News + Events

With A Bang, New Admits Welcomed To CSAIL

7 March 2011

“Go forth and ideate,” said Professor Srini Devadas to the crowd of students gathered in Kiva for Visitors Weekend this past Sunday. Devadas, a member of CSAIL and Interim Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, kicked off an exciting introduction to the lab by encouraging recent MIT admits to have “Eureka moments” while undertaking their graduate research at CSAIL.

Following introductions by Devadas and Delta Electronics Professor and CSAIL Director Victor Zue, visiting students enjoyed a two-hour marathon of brief introductions to research underway at CSAIL during a segment called “Three Minute Madness.” Participating professors and principal investigators were invited to spend three minutes describing their work and enticing students to join their labs, before a gong signaled the need to hand over the podium to the next presenter.

Students heard from a varied crowd of over 30 CSAIL members, ranging from Professor Brian Williams and his work with autonomous systems to Assistant Professor Nickolai Zeldovich and his work creating a program that allows users to go back in time and prevent security breaches. Associate Professor Erik Demaine gave a live paper folding demonstration, Associate Professor Scott Aaronson delved into time travel and Associate Professor Russ Tedrake showed off his prototype for a robotic leg.

Before sending students off for one-on-one meetings with professors and current CSAIL graduate students, Zue made his case for why CSAIL is such a great place to conduct research.

“Today you heard from 33 people out of 100 CSAIL members,” said Zue. “We couldn’t possibly show everything to you, but this is definitely the biggest and the baddest and among the very best places you can be.”